The present invention relates to electronic communication routing systems, and in particular Point of Sale (POS) systems.
There is a large infrastructure in the United States and elsewhere for routing messages from a POS device for approval of a payment card or other instrument. The U.S. has long used magnetic stripe card readers, and the changes to POS equipment to capture chip cards, contactless payment devices, biometric signatures and other payment methods is a slow and expensive ongoing process.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a typical prior art POS authorization routing system. A user device 102 is presented for payment over a connection 104 to a merchant POS 106. For a brick and mortar merchant, this can be a POS with a card reader at a cash register. The connection can be by swiping a mag stripe card, inserting a chip card, waving a contactless card or smart phone, or other appropriately configured mobile device that can communicate with the POS device and provide credentials. For an online transaction, the user computer can connect over the Internet to a merchant server which acts like a POS device and collects the needed data and passes the data to the acquirer in an approved format. The merchant POS, after receiving the account number, expiration date, etc. and receiving transaction data from a cash register, web page, etc., submits the data for approval over another connection 108 to a merchant acquirer computer 110. The connection can be a dial-up phone line, a dedicated data line, the Internet, etc. The merchant acquirer 110 then routs the data over a proprietary network 112 (e.g., VisaNet) to the institution that issued the card/account (Issuing Bank/Member 114). If the card is valid, the transaction is within limits, and a fraud review is clean, issuer 114 sends their response to the authorization request (approval, declination or referral) back through the network (112) who routes the response to the merchant acquirer 110, then through connection 108 to merchant POS 106.
The entire process takes just a few seconds, or less, while the customer is waiting at the merchant's POS. Multiple timers 117, 119, 121 are typically set, at the merchant POS 106, at the merchant acquirer 110 and at the proprietary network 112. If any one of the timer times-out, there may not have been enough time for an approval, and the response will be a decline or some other action, such as a decision based on stand-in parameters when an issuer response isn't timely received. Typically the maximum allowed round trip timeframe is roughly 10 seconds or less.
The limited time has made it nearly impossible to offer other functions or options during the time allotted for all participants in the authorization request to respond. Some systems allow a user to perform actions on a user phone or computer before checkout, such as obtaining and substituting a token, such as a single use account number (see, e.g., Walker Digital U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,949,044 and 7,844,550, and Microsoft U.S. Pat. No. 5,883,810). A tokenization deployment, for example, may utilize a wallet application to initiate the credential substitution(s). Other proposed systems require new hardware or applications, such as for accepting a QR code. E.g., see U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,332,323 and 8,380,177. Some systems have been devised to intercept POS communications for record keeping purposes in parallel. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,626,593 and 9,208,481. However, holding up the transaction for additional functions or processing is typically not an option. There are tens of thousands of players in the payment eco-system, most of which focus on cards, cash and checks today. Areas that need to be addressed (to introduce a change to the process) include training of staff, back office support, exception processing, reporting, loyalty systems, accounting processes and procedures, etc.